


Letters and Lines

by grrlpup



Category: Harriet the Spy - Louise Fitzhugh
Genre: 1970s, College, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-02
Updated: 2014-09-02
Packaged: 2018-02-15 20:23:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2242311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grrlpup/pseuds/grrlpup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beth Ellen starts her college career.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Letters and Lines

**Author's Note:**

  * For [opalmatrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/opalmatrix/gifts).



The entire student body of Bennington College seemed to have exploded over the lawns and walks of campus--basking in the September afternoon sun, reading in the shade of tall trees, and gossiping before dinner in twos and threes on every bench.

The exception was Beth Ellen Hansen, who curled up alone on an aged couch in the laundry room of her house, Sawtell. The washing machines chugged and clicked around her. Her portfolio was upstairs on her bed, tossed there after another demoralizing drawing class. It was full of drawings she hated, careful renderings of assemblages of junk or of bored models. She had almost liked one drawing today, until the instructor called it cartoonish. Cartoonish and lazy.

Why am I even here, she thought, and picked up the letter she’d been reading and trying to answer. A sketchpad was in her lap, the paper faintly green under the fluorescent lights. She ripped off the page she’d started writing on, crumpled it, and lobbed it into the trash can, where it disappeared silently in the mountains of dryer lint.

She liked having letters to _read_ , Beth Ellen thought. Especially from Harriet, who was still in the City, writing from her bedroom where Beth Ellen had done homework and sketched all through their last few years at the Gregory School. Harriet seemed to write whatever was on her mind at the moment; she mailed a sheaf of pages to Beth Ellen at least once a week.

MOUSE, YOU WENT TO THE FAR NORTH AND I’M STILL SITTING IN MY ROOM AT HOME. BUT NEXT YEAR AFTER I PASS ALL THESE DUMB PREREQUISITES THEY’LL LET ME SIGN UP FOR CLASSES WITH TRIPS. MAYBE I’LL BE IN TIBET OR AUSTRALIA. YOU CAN DO JOURNALISM ANYWHERE.

MY MOTHER THOUGHT I SHOULD LIVE IN A DORM, UGH. WHAT IS YOUR ROOMMATE LIKE? TELL ME EVERYTHING. I LOVE MY ROOM, BUT SOMETIMES WHEN I LOOK OUT THE WINDOW AT THE PARK I WISH SOMETHING WOULD HAPPEN, LIKE A DINOSAUR WOULD APPEAR. BUT SOMETHING ALWAYS HAPPENS ON THE SUBWAY. THERE IS THAT.

WHICH REMINDS ME, I SAW YOUR GRANDMOTHER’S DRIVER HARRY YESTERDAY, GOING INTO THE Y. HE DOESN’T SEEM LIKE THE EXERCISING TYPE.

ARE YOU READING THIS IN THE LAUNDRY ROOM? YOU SAID THAT’S WHERE YOU WRITE LETTERS. DON’T YOU HAVE A BILLION CLOTHES THERE WITHOUT WASHING THEM ALL THE TIME? THE NICE THING ABOUT COLLEGE IS YOU CAN WEAR WHAT YOU WANT. MY FATHER SAYS HE ENVIES ME. THIS GIRL IN ONE OF MY CLASSES WEARS A LEATHER JACKET EVERY SINGLE DAY, NO MATTER HOW HOT IT IS. SHE SAYS IT’S LIKE ANOTHER SKIN. I THINK SHE MAY BE ON TO SOMETHING.

Beth Ellen looked at the pad on her lap. _Dear Harriet_ , she wrote at the top. She thought about writing another sentence, perhaps starting with _My roommate_ , but the idea made her hand feel heavy and limp with effort. She slouched down in the couch cushions and let her head loll back. Someone had taped a psychedelic poster up next to the tiny window; both were covered with strings of cobweb, and dead leaves were stuck to the window.

 _Dear Harriet_ , Beth Ellen thought. _My roommate is named Trish. She is a dancer and she told one of the other girls I’m “a little bit Smith-y.” She hangs her tights on the curtain rods._

She knew Harriet would pay avid attention to all of this, but her hand started sketching instead. She drew the row of washers and dryers, each with a face formed by its dials and door, each with a different expression. At the bottom of the page she drew herself on the couch, writing a letter. In script almost too small to read, the letter said, _Dear Harriet, I still hate writing letters._

Smiling, she pulled herself off the couch. She could picture Harriet ripping the envelope open, and the outrage on her face when she found only the picture. It would have to do until Beth Ellen went home for the weekend.

On her way out of the room she nearly ran into a girl holding a rumpled shirt out in front of her. “Do you know how to get oil paint out?” she asked Beth Ellen without preamble.

“You don’t just...wash it?” Beth Ellen said faintly.

“Nope,” the girl said. “Not oil paint, it’ll set and never come out. I’m going from house to house; I already asked everyone I could find at Commons.”

“Hmm,” Beth Ellen said. This was new to her. Were there other things that wouldn’t come out? Was it Smith-y to know, or not to know?

The girl suddenly pointed at her wide-eyed, like Beth Ellen had said something shocking. “The art building. Whoever it is who knows, is in the art building!” She turned and left. Beth Ellen blinked after for a moment, then climbed the stairs to her room.

 

The next weekend Harry picked her up after her last class on Friday afternoon. The big black car, and Harry in his uniform, already looked strange to her. But familiar, too--it was like a half-forgotten part of her New York life, suddenly transported here and decidedly out of place. Beth Ellen deliberately did not look around as she climbed into the car. She didn’t want to confirm her feeling that people were looking at her. She didn’t want to know if Trish, or her drawing instructor, or anyone else she knew might be among them.

For a few miles neither Harry nor Beth Ellen spoke, although the glass between the front and back seats was down. As usual, Beth Ellen couldn’t see Harry’s face, just the familiar view of his hands, at ten and two on the steering wheel, and the back of his head up to the perfectly horizontal line of his chauffeur's cap. A muscle near his jaw bulged rhythmically as he chewed gum.

“Thank you for driving me, Harry,” Beth Ellen said politely. “I know it’s a long round-trip.”

Harry briefly sat up straighter to glance at her in the rear-view mirror. “Sure thing, miss.” She could hear the surprise in his voice: Beth Ellen had been taught all her life to thank the driver, but it had always been a rote sentence as she climbed out of the car.

“Did you get to eat? Do you need to stop for lunch or anything?”

“No, miss. Or do you need a ‘rest stop’?”

She colored and smiled at the invisible quote marks around her grandmother’s term. “No. That’s okay.”

Harry gave her one more friendly glance in the mirror before resuming his usual slouch. “Stopped to see one of my buddies for lunch, he’s a driver over in Farmington, Connecticut. Right on the way, more or less. Shelton works for an old bird a lot like Mrs. Hansen, in fact. Too bad the two of them don’t get together.” He gave a bark of laughter.

Beth Ellen made a strange noise that she hoped signified agreement. She tried to imagine what her grandmother would think of Harry’s wish for her to be friends with his friend’s employer, the old bird. She opened her sketchbook and started trying to draw the fields and hills outside the window, but the car’s movement and the way the landscape kept changing made for a page of wavy, uncertain lines. Going to Bennington, Vermont, to be an artist suddenly felt like a stupid idea. Maybe I shouldn’t go back, she thought. She started doodling two wrinkled vultures in hats, teacups held daintily in their talons.

 

“So do you feel different?” Harriet asked briskly. “Do I seem different? Does New York?” They were in Harriet’s room watching the rain plash against the windows.

“Harriet. It’s only been two weeks,” Beth Ellen said.

“Well, I don’t feel any different.” Harriet rose and examined herself in the mirror. “Everything’s bigger and farther away, but it’s still go to class, come home, go to class again.”

“My grandmother keeps saying I’m not supposed to turn into a Bennington Girl,” Beth Ellen said.

“What does THAT mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Beth Ellen. “But I finally told her it’s not a girls’ school anymore. So maybe there aren’t any Bennington Girls to worry about.”

“Oh, man,” Harriet said. She flopped down on the bed next to Beth Ellen. “I wish I could have seen that.”

Beth Ellen smiled at the ceiling. _Child, you exhaust me_ , her grandmother had said, but in fact she had looked amused, propped as always against masses of pillows in the giant four-poster bed. _I’m fine, you know, darling; you don’t have to come home every two weeks to check on me_ , she had added, but Beth Ellen said she wanted to, for now, since Harry didn’t mind. _The chauffer?_ her grandmother had said, genuinely mystified.

 Now Beth Ellen sat up and picked up a postcard on Harriet’s desk. “Is this from Sport?” she said. “I thought he wasn’t going to college.”

“He isn’t,” Harriet said. “He hates school. His dad’s writing something about racehorses, so they all went down to Florida to watch them run around.”

 _If we stay long enough maybe I’ll go to spring training,_ the card said. _Horses are dumb._

“He said that’s what I should do,” Harriet continued.

“Write about racehorses?”

“No, dummy. Travel around and be a writer.”

Beth Ellen shrugged. “Why can’t you be a writer in New York?”

“I AM!” Harriet yelled without lifting her head off the bed. She slapped the mattress until she found the notebook beside her, then grudgingly sat upright to uncap her pen and start writing. Beth Ellen pulled her sketchbook from the satchel leaning against Harriet’s desk and wondered, contentedly, how to draw rain.

 

Beth Ellen pushed her books away from her and put her head down on her arms. Drawing class had run late, and rather than return to her house with its interminable games of cards and competing record-players, she had taken refuge in an empty classroom to catch up on the rest of her studying.

She rubbed at a smudge of charcoal on the side of her hand. She was getting better, slowly, at the drawing assignments. But the slowness had spread to everything she drew. A picture she’d started last week back in New York, after reading Sport’s postcard, still wasn’t done. These days, when she sketched she felt like her hand was moving through cottage cheese.

Her gaze landed on a letter from Janie, wedged between two volumes in her stack of textbooks. The letter was written on graph paper, probably torn from a lab notebook. Janie had gone to college out west, as far away from her mother as possible, to a small school that she said had its own nuclear reactor. At Janie’s going-away party, to which Janie had invited almost no one besides Beth Ellen and Harriet, Mrs. Gibbs had called that college “the Harvard of the West!” so many times and so loudly that now Beth Ellen couldn’t remember its real name.

Beth Ellen skimmed the paragraphs of crabbed writing. The first half of the letter was a long complaint about an ancient Greek named Hesiod and his theories. _It's just ridiculous. Every freshwoman (and freshman) studying such terrible science._ The second half was about which aspects of life in the dorm were designed to control the students psychologically.

Janie loves it there, Beth Ellen thought with a sigh.

She scooped the letter and books into her satchel, hoisted her portfolio onto her shoulder, and walked into the shadowy hallway and then the warm darkening night. A theater rehearsal of some kind was just getting out, and she trudged against a current of students hauling cut-out plywood shapes and garment bags.

“Hey!” It was the girl from the laundry room, going the same direction as Beth Ellen. “I’m wearing the shirt!”

She swung her arms wide, nearly clobbering an older boy, so Beth Ellen could see the unblemished fabric. “Borax and dish soap,” she said smugly. “You scrub it in with a toothbrush before you wash. Are you an artist too?” She gestured at Beth Ellen’s portfolio. “You didn’t tell me! I’m Anne, by the way.”

Beth Ellen introduced herself, then hesitated. “I’m in first-year drawing.”

“Close enough,” the girl said. “Come help me paint.”

She veered toward Commons, catching the door as the last of the theater students was leaving. To Beth Ellen’s surprise, they bypassed the art classrooms and went up to a small dance studio on the top floor.

Anne flipped the lights on and pointed to masking tape on the floor. “The audience will be here, sitting on the floor, so the mirrors are along one side. That leaves the back and the other side, right?”

Beth Ellen saw that white butcher paper had been taped up, nearly floor to ceiling, over most of two adjoining walls.

Anne pulled a wheeled cart from a corner and began loading Beth Ellen’s arms with brushes, palette knives, and tubs of tempera paint. “It’s a recital with all kinds of music and different dance styles, but the theme is being underwater. Okay?”

Beth Ellen stood there.

Anne took her gently by the shoulders and turned her to face a corner. “You start on that side. I’ll start on the other side and we can meet in the middle. Being Underwater, different moods in different areas.”

Beth Ellen walked up to the wall, set the paint tubs on the floor, and dipped a brush in dark green tempera. It was just paper, she told herself.

She tried a few wavy vertical stripes. Maybe they could be kelp.

“Big,” Anne called to her. “Make everything big or it will take forever.”

Beth Ellen made bigger stripes.

Anne had laid down a sunny yellow on a swath of paper above her head; now she had a brush in each hand and was swirling blue and green together in curves as wide as her outstretched arms.

Beth Ellen opened a tub of purple and began to paint spikes from the floor to knee height. She forgot to tell herself, after awhile, which shapes were what. She forgot to tell herself anything, and just painted.

Her last section was the best, in the middle of the back wall next to Anne’s constellation of sea stars. Beth Ellen painted a tall pink castle that was somehow menacing, its shape nebulous and uncertain through layers of green bubbles. “Cartoonish,” she said aloud. Her voice croaked: it had been hours since either of them spoke aloud.

“Beautiful,” Anne said. She handed Beth Ellen a rag to wipe paint from her fingers.

 

The sun was coming up when they walked out of Commons. Anne gave her a tired wave and headed to her house in the Colonials; Beth Ellen set off across the quiet campus toward her own house. She suddenly remembered that the most recent pair of tights she’d seen on the curtain rod was turquoise-colored, not Trish’s usual pink. But Trish hadn’t mentioned the recital.

When she reached Sawtell, instead of going up to her room Beth Ellen went to the couch in the laundry room again. She pulled a small drawing out of her satchel, the one she’d made while she was thinking about Sport’s postcard. It was inked in black, an outdoor scene. The puffy clouds in the sky were open books, laying flat in the air with their pages ruffling up in curves. The sun shone in their midst, and the sunbeams doubled as motion lines, making it look like the sun had just been hit into the sky by a baseball bat just visible at the bottom of the page.

Beth Ellen pulled out a pen and added grassy hills in the distance, with tiny figures sunbathing in bikinis and throwing Frisbees. She flipped the paper over and drew a short vertical line in the middle. On the right side she lettered Trish’s name, Sawtell House, Bennington. On the left she wrote _I hope this weekend is wonderful. New York next weekend?_ Finally, she drew a six-cent postage stamp in the corner. A tiny Eisenhower peered out from a diving helmet, with bubbles filling the rest of the small square.

Beth Ellen waved the paper back and forth to dry. Leaving her satchel and portfolio, she tiptoed up to her room to drop the postcard on Trish's desk.

 

 


End file.
